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Well, I always wondered what would be the straw that broke 4chan's back - now we know. 4chan is as good as dead, just like Alt.Tasteless before it. Time for the hordes of trolls, sickos, wannabes and script kiddies to find another pit to infest. Wonder where it'll be?
So long 4chan. It's been fun but in time, all things pass.

Whatever passes for censorship in this case is pretty much irrelevant anyway. The pack of photos that started this was almost instantly on piratebay, and after almost four days it's still there with about 27,000 seeders. That won't go away on its own for a while and you don't see piratebay taking it down. The initial leak just happened to be from 4chan; the next such leak could come from almost anywhere.

But a huge amount of what is posted on 4chan are just copied images or gifs created from (one would assume) copyrighted films/videos. And I'm not just talking about the porn sections. If they go down this path and actually enforce it I think it's very likely a number of the forums will dry up.

You are 100% correct. This is yet another place where the victims (and they ARE victims), in their move to try and stop the information from spreading, completely ignored that the Streisand Effect is a very real and powerful thing. Honestly, a better approach would have been the Paris Hilton/Kim Kardashian approach, "Ok, I can't get rid of this, may as well make an official distribution channel and make money off of it." But obviously, given the personal nature of the leak, they'd have to be ok with that de

The funny thing with this is that, since the half life of most posts is something around one or two hours, the system will remove any offending post before the DMCA can be processed. I expect that 99% of all DMCA requests can be forwarded to/dev/null. So yea...

FMIQ (as implemented in the imgSeek server) is pretty good at detecting everything but crops, and that was 5-6 years ago when I last played with it. It likely has no problems with them now. This is a reasonably well solved problem.

Since one of the "celebrities" was under age when the photos were taken I suspect that the ante with respect to the legal ramifications may be a little higher than just a nasty letter from a lawyer. That sort of thing tends to focus the mind.

Since one of the "celebrities" was under age when the photos were taken I suspect that the ante with respect to the legal ramifications may be a little higher than just a nasty letter from a lawyer. That sort of thing tends to focus the mind.

Thats interesting. Since its then illegal to have those images it is not possible for anyone to give consent to storing them on iCloud.What is the legal status for hosting a server with illegal information on it?

From what I have heard, it is not that clear. Seems that few non-nude photos were done underage, while nude photos are already after 18. It was worded confusingly by lawyers on purpose to scare people away.

If there are underage nude photos there, the lady in question is in a trouble herself...

I was trying to say that the legal risk was not there, not speak to what the policies were.

The law is (from wikipedia, I'm too lazy to read the actual statutes right now):

The PROTECT Act also amended 18 U.S.C. 2252A, which was part of the original CPPA. The amendment added paragraph (a)(3), which criminalizes knowingly advertising or distributing "an obscene visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; or a visual depiction of an actual minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct". The law draws a distinction between obscene depiction of any minor, and mere depiction of an actual minor.

As long as it's not sexually explicit it's legal, though also:

In 1994, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled that the federal statute contains no requirement that genitals be visible or discernible. The court ruled that non-nude visual depictions can qualify as lascivious exhibitions and that this construction does not render the statute unconstitutionally overbroad.[19]

So genitals are a help in determining, but are not a requirement, and if it's not sexually explicit, it's not pornography, and therefore not child pornagraphy. I have not looked at the pictures in question, because, I have

Thanks, this should help anyone that thinks 4chan is absolute scum see that when presented with actual vileness, they error on the side of decency (they still surpass what I want to see, but I'm a prude, and at least they protect those without full personhood).

4chan has always had rules and restrictions. Things like loli and guro are not allowed to be posted outside of the Random board, certain boards are considered SFW and don't allow porn, and posters are required to be over 18 to post. All of these are enforced quite a bit, even so far as public bans for people who admit to being under 18 on the boards.

Now this usually doesn't stop the users from just posting what they want (i.e. you can still find people posting porn on "worksafe" boards), but they do usually

Like Usenet, it really isn't anything goes. Stuff that most people don't like is pushed off to alternative locations, there, bug not where anyone has to deal with it. What would kill 4chan, because evidently it runs with no significant budget or profit, would be a single lawsuit. By creating a belated DCMA policy, the site is protecting itself from such an event. Look at it this way. If Arthur Anderson had created a policy stating the conditions and intervals that documents would be destroyed, it might still be in existence today. But it did not, and panicked, and is gone. It is good that 4chan is being more forward thinking.

Come now anon, don't know that all gamers are misogynists, and the feminists who support this line of thinking believe that all men should be killed. I wish I was kidding on both points, but the "gaming media" and their 8+ articles containing 35-45% verbatim material say otherwise, along with the social justice warrior crowd that are attacking, doxxing, and threatening anyone who doesn't fall in step with their bigoted view point.

They should update the site so the post is archived, image removed and a message put up stating "Removed due to DMCA request by on behalf on ". Either, way they'll need to contact the poster about the take down notice, so they can respond. With a bonus that it's a confirmation their picture is real, not fake.

I can attest. Make the increasingly epidemic SJW quasi-trolls look dumb enough by actual arguments that'll stick even in their otherwise reflexive idiot-supporters' craws, and the thread will vanish in a couple minutes, regardless of board, popularity, or thread age. They've killed plenty of unusually intelligent conversations within the last few months that way. Trolls on trolls or genuine freakouts will last way longer for no other apparent reason.

Image board like 4chan don't permanent host data. On the quick moving boards, images are gone before someone even could type up a DMCA request. Maybe they'll prevent that picture being posted again. I wonder how their members are going to react to new censorship.

I used to have a job where I handled them. They are pretty much auto-generated by companies that charge the content owners for each notice. Most are fake and it's a massive scam to steal money from them. We ended up deleting most of them as the data in them was clearly made up. Basically they are required by law to do "something" about DMCA complaint, and you're seeing it. The net effect will probably be nothing. We rarely got to then in under a week, so I suspect they will take even longer. By then, the threads would be dead anyway.

Serious question: Do you know of any instance where the originator of a bogus DMCA takedown request was punished?

From what I understand, the originator can't just search for "Lindsay Lohan" on BitTorrent and Usenet, and fire out a bunch of takedown requests -- the signed/authenticated takedown notice stipulates that they are the owner of the material.

Said another way, if you uploaded a Linux distribution and called it "Rihanna Nudes" or something, and Rihanna's people sent a DMCA takedow

No. The DMCA notice has two parts: one where you say (under pain of perjury) that you are indeed the owner of a copyright or the owner's designated representative (or whatever), and one where you say (no perjury here) that you have good reason to believe that something violates the copyright.

I can't legally look for "Lindsay Lohan" on those spaces and fire out a bunch of takedown requests, because I need to swear that I have the copyright or am working for whoever does. Rihanna's people can indeed fil

The point is, by the time a request has been submitted, received and acted on, the content has probably already expired and disappeared. Everything is temporary there. I can't see much actual censorship resulting from any of this. The memory of 4chan is not on the website, it's in the dark corners of its users' hard disks, where no censorship reaches. Enforce takedowns as much as you like, but once an image expires or is taken down someone else will post it, probably under a different name or with a sill

There is an auto-ban for unsavoury content that has been expanded to it.Most people will see 4chan and think all of these images are there forever, but they don't understand things vanish after so long, depending on the speed of the board. (RIP marked for deletion (old))Now that they have a legal page with DMCA, they can't do shit to the site, even though almost all posters know how to get around the filter by adding pixels, changing hue, sat, literally anything with

You do know that all 4chan threads auto-expire, usually within an hour or two, sometimes a day or two if carefully bumped, right? DMCA basically says remove THAT item. Sure, bro, just a minute... oh look it's gone now!

A recent change allowed threads on some boards (well, I only know/a/ does) to auto-archive on expire, which lets a thread hang around un-indexed for another two days or so. This is great when you have to go somewhere for a few hours, just leave the thread up and you can catch the rest of it

Well with the ephemeral nature of 4chan posts, it seems like this is more of a technicality than anything. The big boards are pretty fast, so posts are automatically wiped after a few hours at most. Infringing content will probably be off the site by the time a content owner's lawyers have time to fire off an email. On slower boards, they can be up for days or maybe even months, but I doubt anyone would bother sending a DMCA for something on, for example, the papercraft board.

All in all, it's probably just for moot to cover his ass and claim safe harbor, especially since content usually deletes itself in a few hours. Most of the time, he won't have to even do a thing.

Then Encyclopedia Dramatica [encyclopediadramatica.es] will be the unbiased source on how long they will sarcastically abide the policy before they just trash the hell out of it and forget the whole thing and not care anymore.

I didn't read it in much detail, but apparently it's merely there so that they have a policy. And apparently it's intended to give the complainers hoops to jump until the subject of the complaint is auto-expired anyhow.

many people think 4chan is a place where 'anything goes.' thats not the case. the/b board is where the most shocking content submission and conversation happens, and its arguably been the one 4chans owner moot (christopher poole) has had the most trouble handling in the past. Poole determined rather early on that he was willing to sacrifice 4chans freedom of speech so long as someone was willing to foot the bill for his posh new york condo and hipster pedigree. He used to at least make a passing attempt at participation by dredging up old 4chan memes like 'crescent fresh' but lately its mostly mods and ops in his name that enforce the christmas hat overlays and such. Its nothing new though, 4chan has had a DMCA policy for nearly a decade and will gladly redact link content and ban users for posting torrents.

poole has always done the DMCA shimmy because while leaks like this draw traffic, they also have the ability to draw him into protracted litigation and harm his advertising revenue stream. hes worried about celebrities in this case growing a pair and sending him to court personally, or attacking his advertisers.

Fakes are not necessarily legal in all jurisdictions. In the US, there's a federal law, and I assume fifty state laws on it, and they may not all agree. Other countries may have different laws than those in the US.

I'm not even sure fakes are legal in the US. If the head of an identifiable minor was put on the body of somebody else doing something sexual, I don't know what the legalities are. If this matters to you, well, I'd normally tell you to get a real lawyer, but on this I'll just tell you to FOA

No, since 1973 copyrights don't have to be applied for. It is sufficient that the Work of Art was created, and that the level of creativeness was high enough. And yes, in theory you could leak some Work of Art of you and then sue the people who distribute it. But the problem is: Your Work of Art has to be appealling enough for people to actually wanting to copy and to distribute it.

No. You own the copyrights on content you create, by the very act of creating it. You take a photo, you are the copyright holder, right then and there.

so i can take some nude selfies and then leak them and then sue for millions?

No, not on the basis of your holding the copyright. Not unless you can show that you'd normally make millions off of the use of that image anyway. Because unless you REGISTER the copyright, federally, you can only sue to stop infringing use and claim - at most - the customary fee you'd normally have collected if the infringing person had agreed to license t

The only board this kind of thing could really matter on is/b/. Any of the others slow enough to persist threads for days (3DCG, oh no someone might post a 3D model of a cone) are benign and thus this policy amendment won't accomplish anything.

You have a bunch of pictures that are KNOWN to have been taken by and stolen from people with enough money to launch some (for anybody else) seriously espensive lawsuits. With a functioning (if often moot) DMCA policy, 4chan is arguably immune from most of those lawsuits.

If the people posting the offending images are willing to defend those lawsuits, it's got nothing to do with 4chan any more.